On-going
series: Crisis in the Caucasus - 2009
The Russian / Georgian Conflict and Its Impact on AzerbaijanWindow on Eurasia: Original
Blog Article

Vienna, February 3 - From 1.4 to 3.2 million ethnic Russians
are likely to leave the former Soviet republics in Central Asia
over the next four years in order to live and work in Russia,
according to a study prepared by the Moscow Institute of CIS
Countries for the Russian Federation's foreign ministry.

If that projection holds, it
would have profound effects on both the Central Asian countries
and on Russia, making the former far more ethnically homogenous
but at the cost of the loss of some of their most educated people
and the latter less able to play the ethnic card in its effort
to maintain Moscow's influence there.http://www.rusk.ru/newsdata.php?idar=180988

At the end of last year, the
Moscow institute polled ethnic Russians in four of the five Central
Asian countries. (No survey was made in Turkmenistan.) Thirty-nine
percent of ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan said they wanted to
move permanently to Russia, as did 72.2 percent in Kyrgyzstan,
34.6 percent in Uzbekistan, and nearly 50 percent in Tajikistan.

Because this poll asked about
intentions, it is entirely possible that these figures, which
would represent a significant rise in Russian out-migration compared
to the last decade, overstate, perhaps by a large measure, the
share of ethnic Russians in that region who will leave, especially
if economic conditions in the Russian Federation deteriorate
further.

The reasons that ethnic Russians
have for leaving are obvious: a demographic situation in which
their share of the population will continue to decline even if
none of them leaves, the policies of the governments there to
promote both the language and status of the titular nationalities,
and economic conditions even worse than those in Russia.

The rapid growth of the titular
nationalities and the relative and absolute decline of the ethnic
Russian community are illustrated by the transformation of the
ethnic mix in Kazakhstan. In 1970, there were 5.5 million Russians
and only 4.2 million Kazakhs. As of 2006, ethnic Kazakhs formed
58.9 percent of the total, and Russians formed only 25.9 percent.

Similar and in some cases even
more dramatic global shifts have occurred elsewhere, and they
have been regularly reported over the last 15 years, with many
in the capitals of these countries welcoming such trends while
some in Moscow have expressed concern about what this means for
the future of Russia's relations with these countries.

But far less attention has been
given to the way in which Russian flight has contributed to changes
at the micro level, changes that appear in some cases at least
to have reached the point of no return. That is, the ethnic Russian
communities involved are now so small that they cannot support
the kind of institutions that have traditionally held them together.

In an article posted on Fergana.ru
this week, Viktor Dubovitsky, an ethnic Russian historian from
Dushanbe, describes how this is taking place with regard to parishes
of the Russian Orthodox Church in Tajikistan, parishes that have
declined to the point that they cannot hold or even attract priests.
http://www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=6049

As a result, he writes, there
has been "a nearly universal collapse of parish communities,"
one that church leaders have failed to address by providing special
training for new priests. As a result, seminary graduates "do
not understand how to organize" parishioners in often difficult
locations and do not want to serve in places like Tajikistan.

"For many years,"
he continues, "there has been a shortage of priests."
In the city of Kurgan-Tyube, for example, the parishioners have
not had a resident priest since 2000. Occasionally, a priest
does pay a brief visit, but the community is suffering from the
lack of having a leader on the spot.

And it is not just the decline
in the number of ethnic Russians there that is driving this process:
with the withdrawal of Russian troops, priests who serviced them
and also other Russians living in the region have departed, leaving
their non-military parishioners without a spiritual father.

At a time when the Moscow Patriarchate
takes pride in having increased the number of monasteries from
18 to 300, Dubovitsky complains, the church has signally failed
to provide "a single priest" to provide spiritual and
cultural support for the dwindling ethnic Russian communities
in Central Asia.

If the causes of Russian flight
are obvious, so too are the consequences: For the Central Asian
countries, the departure of the ethnic Russians will leave them
more ethnically homogeneous and more Islamic and less attached
to the Soviet past. But it will also deprive them of people with
significant skills and thus make their economic situation even
worse.

(More significantly but also
certainly more distantly, the departure of the ethnic Russians
could open the way to greater cooperation among the Central Asians.
That is because it would allow Kazakhstan to take part in regional
projects more fully and, by acting as a counterweight to Uzbekistan's
power, thus open the way for the other countries to do so as
well.)

For Moscow, the consequences
of this new Russian flight also will be mixed. On the one hand,
many Russians will celebrate what they will call "the return"
of their "compatriots" as a measure of the continuing
attractiveness and economic and cultural superiority of their
nation over the peoples of Central Asia.

But on the other, Russian policy
makers will have to cope with a situation in which they will
no longer be able to exploit the presence of ethnic Russians
in the Central Asian countries as the foundation of ties between
Moscow and the region and also with the probability that they
will have to deal with a more Islamic and even Islamist set of
states nearby.